AWS SAP Migration: Ensuring a Smooth Transition

Migrating SAP to AWS is a major transformation, particularly for businesses moving from onsite hosting. But the reasons for this don’t have all that much to do with AWS itself — it’s really just a platform. What is more significant is what’s driving your migration. Are you motivated by a public cloud consolidation for operational efficiency? Are you using the public cloud to decentralize your landscape to mitigate risks? Is the main motive an SAP database upgrade itself?

The migration you choose needs to fit your SAP goals and your larger cloud strategy. Whether that’s a lift and shift operation, backend database migration, or a full partner upgrade to S/4HANA — each has its own unique and complex considerations. Having a partner can help you throughout the process, from pinning down your goals, to choosing a migration strategy, to transitioning to steady-state operation.

AWS SAP Migration Strategy

Not all SAP implementation and migration projects are the same. For many of our customers, the most effective strategy is to start with a move to Suite on HANA, focusing on the backend database upgrade and migration, and leaving a front end application upgrade for another time. Starting with the backend allows us to clean up the code and realize database efficiencies without changing the business processes that can be impacted by changes to the application layer.

By leaving the application layer intact, a Suite on HANA migration gives customers some easy wins. They’ll achieve a powerful performance boost, migrate to the cloud, and gain some experience with HANA. This approach also allows IT more time to plan and execute the functional changes that come with the S/4HANA upgrades. It also lets you quickly show ROI on your AWS SAP migration.

Steady State SAP Basis Operation Requires Daily Maintenance

SAP performance tuning is critical to keeping your landscape healthy. SAP is finicky, and tuning requires specific skillsets. Your partner’s approach to tuning is also a key factor. Many companies treat SAP like an ordinary public cloud workload. If a VM starts to malfunction, they’ll just kill it and fire up another one. Although it’s not dangerous, this approach can cause disruptions to SAP, which makes it unsuitable for a production environment.

Symmetry’s approach is to treat SAP more like a private cloud, even when it’s hosted in a public cloud environment. If something goes wrong with a VM, we shift workloads away from it, and transfer new workloads to a different VM, but we keep the operational as long as necessary to avoid disruption. Additionally, we take a proactive approach to performance tuning, using monitoring as a tool to anticipate events, not react to them. This approach ensures extremely consistent performance and ultra-high uptime.

For AWS SAP Migration, a Provider Isn’t Enough

AWS SAP migration isn’t just a move to a new hosting environment — it’s the beginning of a new phase in operating your SAP landscape. You need a partner who is in it for the long haul, with the technical competencies to ensure you’re successful in your new hosting environment. With deep expertise in SAP and hosting, a high-touch approach to customer service and the extreme attention to detail that SAP demands, we’re the right provider to guide you through the journey.

Jay Graboff is a Senior Cloud Product Manager that has been evangelizing innovation and digital transformation before there was either. With over 8 years delivering Public, Private and Proprietary Cloud, his passion and love affair with technology is rooted in what the Cloud can enable.